In the discussion surrounding plan S, one of the issues that keeps coming back is how many publishing venues are currently compliant. Or, phrased differently, how many of their current publication venues researchers fear will no longer be available to them.

However, the current state should be regarded as a starting point, not the end point. As Plan S is meant to effect changes in the system of scholarly publication, it is important to look at the potential for moving towards compliance, both on the side of publishers as well as on the side of authors.

In the discussion surrounding plan S, one of the issues that keeps coming back is how many publishing venues are currently compliant. Or, phrased differently, how many of their current publication venues researchers fear will no longer be available to them.

However, the current state should be regarded as a starting point, not the end point. As Plan S is meant to effect changes in the system of scholarly publication, it is important to look at the potential for moving towards compliance, both on the side of publishers as well as on the side of authors.

In the discussion surrounding Plan S, one of the issues that keeps coming back is how many publishing venues are currently compliant. Or, phrased differently, how many of their current publication venues researchers fear will no longer be available to them.

However, the current state should be regarded as a starting point, not the end point. As Plan S is meant to effect changes in the system of scholarly publication, it is important to look at the potential for moving towards compliance, both on the side of publishers as well as on the side of authors.

To get a first indication as to what that potential for open access is across different disciplines, we looked at a particular subset of journals, namely those in Web of Science. For this first approach we chose Web of Science because of its multidisciplinary nature, because it covers both open and closed journals, because it has open access detection and because it offers subject categories and finally, because of its functionality in generating and exporting frequency tables of journal titles. We fully recognize the inevitable bias related to using Web of Science as source, and address this further below and in an accompanying blogpost.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.